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Starting a Blog for Your Business

Starting a Blog for Your Business

If you have a business and want to grow your client base or if you just want to improve your PR, starting a blog is a great place to begin. Having a blog for your business will help you prove your expertise, provide news and updates, connect with potential customers, and provides a free marketing tool. The only problem is, to reap all these benefits, you actually have to start a blog.

If you’re unsure of where to start in creating a blog for your business, follow the steps below.

1. Know Your Goals and Purpose
It’s easy to buy a WordPress theme and just start writing, but it probably won’t be as affective if you don’t have a clear set of goals for your business blog. Start by writing down what you want your blog to accomplish, whether it’s to communicate with old clients or reach new clients. Once you know this, you’ll be able to craft a better idea of what your blog needs to include and what type of information you’ll be providing on your blog.

2. Do Your Research
Another boring, but necessary, step in creating a blog. Once you know what the goal of your blog is, you want to focus in on your ideal audience for the blog. You can’t accomplish your goals if you don’t know what your readers want, so look into it. Ask your current customers or go online and do a little research on potential customers. What do they want? What do they look for? How can your blog fill those needs? Another bit of research you might want to do is check out your competitions blog. It will give you an idea of what you need to surpass.

3. Assign a Writer
This is a step many small business overlook. Sure, you can setup and start a blog, but who is going to keep it going? Find a few people in the business who can consistently provide content for your blog. Make sure they know what the goals are and who your audience is before they begin. Also, creating a schedule so there aren’t any gaps or misunderstandings will make it easier for everyone involved.

4. Create the Blog
This is when the fun begins. Keeping your target audience in mind, pick out a blog theme and design it to appeal to the audience, all while staying true to your brand. Once it’s looking perfect, get the writers to start adding the content. You might want to start with several posts at first, to beef up the blog, then follow the schedule you made in step 3.

5. Market Your Blog
Now that you have a well-designed, fleshed out blog, you want to get people reading it. Get on your social networks and share the blog. Tell customers and clients when they come in that they can find helpful information on your blog. Find ways to drive traffic to your blog. You don’t want all your hard work to go to waste, so market as much as possible. The more your blog grows, the more potential you have of bringing more customers and clients into your business.

WordPress Themes

While the WordPress.org repository has many useful themes available for free, you might find that you need a more customizable solution. We like the Genesis Framework from StudioPress for these situations.